The present invention generally relates to bandpass filters and in particular to an improved SAW bandpass filter with very low insertion loss.
SAW devices have traditionally been used in transversal type filters. The key element in SAW filter design is the interdigital transducer (IDT); it converts the electrical signal to the acoustic waveform and thereby determines the filter impedance and frequency response. In the conventional filter arrangement the power is divided by the launching transducer. Half is usually sent toward an absorber and half propagates towards the output. At the output transducer, some of the signal (at most half) is delivered to the load, some passes the transducer and is absorbed, and some is reflected. In instances where the signal reflected by the output IDT reaches the input IDT part of it is reflected back to the output. The doubly reflected signal is detected at the output and causes passband ripple.
One solution to this problem of having either high insertion loss or significant ripple is to use unidirectional transducers to couple all of the electrical energy into a single acoustic wave. Unidirectional transducers, however, are made with phased arrays of electrodes, usually three or four electrodes per wavelength, which tends to complicate the fabrication process by introducing multiple layers of metalization. Such an arrangement may also limit filter bandwidth and increase the component count.
SAW filters in use today consist mainly of two basic types: (1) Transversal filters which include a sending and a receiving transducer on a single substrate. The selectivity characteristics are determined by the number of finger pairs in the transducers and by the finger overlap geometry or "weighting". Insertion loss tends to be high because simple transducers are bidirectional i.e. one half the input power is transmitted in each of two opposite directions. Various methods have been devised to lower insertion loss such as unidirectional transducers and multiple element transducers in parallel. However each of these methods has severe design restrictions and tend to be effective only over a limited bandwidth and/or center frequency range. (2) Coupled resonator filters which include a minimum of two acoustically coupled SAW resonators. They are basically the equivalent of monolithic crystal filters. The coupled bandwidth is controlled by the individual resonator geometries and their separation. Bandwidths are limited to relatively narrow values and design optimization will appear to require several iterations.